Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” 1st Chapter

It is raining stupidly in Dallas. Flooded roads have not prevented traffic. Out of the wet and sticky weather people roam into stores, gas stations, restaurants. They do not quite bring boredom with them, but a more specific problem. They don’t know what to do with themselves at home. They want out of the house, a respite from themselves, roommates, and families. Perhaps it is this urge that has caused mankind to engage in centuries of killing. Perhaps man has seen war not only as a way out of the house, but as a way to help others escape the house. The worst that can happen is that you die, which was going to happen anyway.

I want everyone to shut up and read a book. Already I have been told that I know nothing about sports because I wouldn’t indulge a theory from someone who doesn’t know the difference between a baseball and a bowling ball. I have also listened to a rant about an entire workplace needs to be fired, a rant so composed and comprehensive that it did not lack for want of practice. There’s flooding down in Texas, and this is what really happens when all of the telephone lines are down: every crank has his moment.

However, years of rambling about books and poems have shown me that I, as a crank, have certainly had my moments. Does reading do more than act as a pacifier? I’d like to walk through some remarks of Nietzsche, remarks about listening to opera, which I think can be applied to the experience of reading. In the first chapter of The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche tells us he put Bizet’s Carmen on autoplay to such a degree that he surprised himself:

Yesterday I heard — would you believe it? — Bizet’s masterpiece, for the twentieth time. Again I stayed there with tender devotion; again I did not run away. This triumph over my impatience surprises me. How such a work makes one perfect! One becomes a “masterpiece” oneself.

Twenty times he heard Carmen, staying with “tender devotion,” triumphing over his own impatience. So far, this fanaticism seems familiar. However, I would note two peculiarities. First, he says he “did not run away.” One could take this as a joke about the extent of his impatience. I’m inclined to think it is something more, as it implies he has been looking for an opera, a work of art, to do no less than worship. Second, he claims Carmen “makes one perfect,” making its mere listeners a “masterpiece.”

So yeah, I do think Nietzsche introduces the theme of how attentiveness to art transforms us. He’s starting from a specific vantage, that of the fanatic. One lets oneself get a little crazy — okay, maybe more than a little crazy — in order to see how some notes, some words, can move and make us. How is Nietzsche himself molded? He feels he becomes a better philosopher through masterful music:

Really, every time I heard Carmen I seemed to myself more of a philosopher, a better philosopher, than I generally consider myself: so patient do I become, so happy, so Indian, so settled. — To sit five hours: the first stage of holiness!

More patient, happier, more settled: these are traits Nietzsche claims here forge a better lover of wisdom. There is a caveat, of course. As he is “more Indian,” joining “the first stage of holiness,” one wonders if he is indeed becoming a better philosopher, or more religious in some quasi-philosophic way. If loving wisdom entails a radical skepticism which must question belief, it is hard to see how philosophy and religion can be joined. However, I think it prudent to at least temporarily entertain the notion that certain philosophic and religious characteristics coincide. This is not to say that philosophy and religion can be reconciled. It is simply to let Nietzsche’s surface be until a precise reason to question it emerges.

If Nietzsche proposes, for a moment, some sort of alliance between philosophy and religion, he does manage to be clear about the cause. Loving Bizet means rejecting Wagner, and Wagner is “brutal,” “artificial,” “innocent” all at once. This combination is most “disagreeable” and most “modern:”

May I say that the tone of Bizet’s orchestra is almost the only one I can still endure? That other orchestral tone which is now the fashion, Wagner’s, brutal, artificial, and “innocent” at the same time — thus it speaks all at once to the three senses of the modern soul — how harmful for me is this Wagnerian orchestral tone! I call it sirocco. I break out into a disagreeable sweat. My good weather is gone.

Philosophy and religion represent the most ancient of days. In either case, both call mankind to love and wisdom. Modernity, in its brutality, artificiality, and innocence, is about something else. On the surface, it looks like dominion or control. That certainly is one problem of modernity, but the deeper problem reveals itself in the word “innocent.” One of the most cruel things I have experienced in my life — brutal, one might say — has been when I’ve been right, and people with power over me didn’t like me being right, doubling-down on their wrongness. They attacked me on artificial grounds incessantly, making me look wrong for both moral and logical reasons. In their own way, they were innocent. They literally didn’t know any better. One can’t know any better if love and wisdom are not priorities. I submit, for my Straussian readers curious about modernity, how much the fatal flaw of modern thinking is a crude notion of justification. It’s not really about taking control of a chaotic world through knowledge and action, but about the pursuit of technology or expertise being the only justification possible.

What does any of this have to do with reading? Everything. Reading, at its best, is letting an art take over one’s life. It’s countercultural in the extreme, opposing the world from the 16th century onward. That is not to say the world since then has only been a failure: far from it. It is to say that any regime, including a regime of thought, taken to an extreme is no regime at all, no thought at all. So how do we read? Nietzsche, in telling us about opera, informs us of his “aesthetics.” He’s telling us about how he writes:

This music seems perfect to me. It approaches lightly, supplely, politely. It is pleasant, it does not sweat. “What is good is light; whatever is divine moves on tender feet”: first principle of my aesthetics. This music is evil, subtly fatalistic: at the same time it remains popular — its subtlety belongs to a race, not to an individual. It is rich. It is precise. It builds, organizes, finishes: thus it constitutes the opposite of the polyp in music, the “infinite melody.” Have more painful tragic accents ever been heard on the stage? How are they achieved?

Bizet’s music seems perfect, he claims. “It approaches lightly, supplely, politely.” We can see characteristics of the music which the listener can immediately translate for the purpose of shaping his own character. A lighter, more flexible, more polite soul can charm others, be regarded as perfect. It will be “pleasant,” not straining its owner.

There is more. The music can be seen as no less than a life in full. “Rich” and “precise,” one can go back to it and learn much about one’s own life. “It builds, organizes, finishes.” Not just a life lived, but one that can be relived, understood from the inside out. Yet Nietzsche might oppose this interpretation of mine, where music, self-awareness, and the experience of reading are all one. He claims “this music is evil, subtly fatalistic: at the same time it remains popular — its subtlety belongs to a race, not to an individual.” Two problems for my interpretation arise: first, is Nietzsche preventing me from speaking of learning how to be an individual? The subtlety of the music “belongs to a race,” after all. Second, do the terms “evil, subtly fatalistic” stop us from taking any lessons from the music? It is “evil,” and it concerns fate, what cannot be changed.

I suspect these questions are less an obstacle than one might think, but I must be honest about the shortcomings of my interpretation. Suffice to say that I think the “evil, subtly fatalistic” music, where the “subtlety” belongs to a race, speaks to the intellectual honesty of the music. Bizet’s Carmen, in its tragic form, recalls Greek tragedy. It speaks of the pain of love and does not insist on itself as a work of towering genius, one that would remake mankind wholly. The subtlety of a race is precondition, in this case, for the emergence of an individual. Nietzsche thus asks how the most “painful tragic accents,” the voices of the tragedy, were achieved. How does music, or a piece of writing, enable one to discover oneself? He answers this through the via negativa:

Without grimaces. Without counterfeit. Without the lie of the great style.

Wagner’s artifice, as we learn later in the work, involves the constant repetition of a redemption narrative. In other words, instead of displaying pain and tragedy as they are, he tries to impose, showing the worthiness of ritual and sacrifice. Since his heroes and heroines die for love, he ends up warping what love itself is, making a redemption narrative (e.g. Christianity) a syrupy romance. Upon this lazy and brutish sentimentality, Wagner will attempt to found no less than the Reich.

The full experience of reading, then, depends a lot upon what the author does not do, what temptations the audience refuses to indulge. Nietzsche is becoming a better philosopher through Bizet, because Bizet is treating him like an equal, like he is intelligent, and Nietzsche accepts this challenge. Wagner, on the other hand, is a dictator, repeating himself until his listeners despair and then, with no reason of their own left, believe him:

Finally, this music treats the listener as intelligent, as if himself a musician — and is in this respect, too, the counterpart of Wagner, who was, whatever else he was, at any rate the most impolite genius in the world (Wagner treats us as if — he says something so often — till one despairs — till one believes it).

Of course, Bizet, in creating a masterpiece, did not think through how every member of his audience would receive it. This is the great mystery of creating something beautiful which inspires thoughtfulness. Why can’t everything and anything make us wiser? We have part of the answer in what Wagner does wrong. His obnoxious claims to genius are really a form of bullying, and he reinforces the worst tendencies of the modern world, unable to help his audience conceive something different. Still, even though Bizet’s work gives the soul certain graces, what exactly does it do correctly? A very specific virtue accompanies great art:

Once more: I become a better human being when this Bizet speaks to me. Also a better musician, a better listener. Is it even possible to listen better? — I actually bury my ears under this music to hear its causes. It seems to me I experience its genesis — I tremble before dangers that accompany some strange risk; I am delighted by strokes of good fortune of which Bizet is innocent. — And, oddly, deep down I don’t think of it, or don’t know how much I think about it. For entirely different thoughts are meanwhile running through my head.

Nietzsche, one of the greatest readers and writers to ever walk the planet, says he feels a better listener when engaged with Carmen. We can read “listening” broadly, as receptivity to the human condition: “I become a better human being when this Bizet speaks to me.” The funny thing is the precise genesis of this virtue. Bizet cannot know how Nietzsche will know. Nor can Nietzsche truly know Carmen as a work of art. The reader/listener must always work with his perception of what he engages. The true genesis, the true causes of the music are the dangers and fortunes Nietzsche becomes aware of in his own life. As the reader/listener becomes self-aware, he engages the art to a greater degree, and the art gives back as it is given. It is that interplay which constitutes the object. Wagner’s moralistic dictation does not allow for such interplay. Certain propositions, such as “the world is X” or “all people are Y,” do not attend self-reflection as much as replace it. An emergent nationalism, as we’re seeing now, makes every excuse to prevent individual thought, as unity is far more important than difference for power’s sake.

Nietzsche goes even further than I do. His gratefulness to Bizet for making him a better philosopher includes his pinpointing times he thinks he’s achieved wisdom. A better reader, a better listener, is a lover of wisdom, full stop. It’s quite a radical teaching, because the biggest dorks I know who have no chance of understanding the human condition in their present state do read too much. But Nietzsche can see himself growing with the music, can see himself seeing that much more of the world. Paying attention to the words of others is a remarkable advance:

Has it been noticed that music liberates the spirit? gives wings to thought? that one becomes more of a philosopher the more one becomes a musician? — The gray sky of abstraction rent as if by lightning; the light strong enough for the filigree of things; the great problems near enough to grasp; the world surveyed as from a mountain. — I have just defined the pathos of philosophy. — And unexpectedly answers drop into my lap, a little hail of ice and wisdom, of solved problems. — Where am I? — Bizet makes me fertile. Whatever is good makes me fertile. I have no other gratitude, nor do I have any other proof for what is good.

“Whatever is good makes me fertile.” This declaration of the human good is reached only through a willingness to work through difficulties. Nietzsche’s strange discussion almost forms a story. Abstractions, which one must work with as an intellectual, are suddenly brought to an end by the presence of the world. It’s like no less than lightning strikes, but lightning, while shaking one to the core, only gives one a second to see things. “The pathos of philosophy” is how near the great problems seemed to be once, right within one’s grasp, yet they never can be seen again. What one gets instead is a view of the world, from far above. It’s more real, but still abstract in its own way. One learns to deal with smaller problems, with one’s own perspective, and from that individual growth, the glimpse of the whole makes a peculiar sense. It is the inaccessible which underlies all human knowing. It can never be done away with because it is the fact of perspective. The whole world surveyed from a mountain top is the same as being hit with a hail of ice and wisdom, here and there. The funny thing is that what one learns though one’s perspective adds up. It can never be a whole which defines the universe, because it does so much more than that.

About Ashok

Student of Political Philosophy. Writes too much, badly needs an editor. Everything on this blog will eventually be revised or eliminated. The hope of this blog is to present you varied, thoughtful works, ones not typically engaged online. Contact me.

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"I hold there is no sin but ignorance" - Machiavelli, in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta